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San Bernardino Mayoral Candidate Malmuth Wants More Innovation & Less Self-Interest At City Hall

Dan Malmuth says he is running for San Bernardino mayor “in order to continue the process of innovation and implementation of the long delayed additional structural changes that were commenced by the recent revision of the city charter, and reduce the detrimental self-interests and competitiveness of senior city leaders. The recent city charter revisions shifted the balance of power from the city council to the mayor and further structural changes are required to redistribute some of the power of governing from the mayor to the residents of San Bernardino in a more democratic set-up involving increased direct resident participation.”
Malmuth contends he is qualified to hold the position of mayor “based on my work experience and education, having worked for 19 years as a municipal government management analyst for the City of Los Angeles,” with both the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the city’s aviation division, known as Los Angeles World Airports. He further cited his “23 years of employment in the advertising and feature film production industries. I worked as a television producer for many major advertising agencies and mid-sized film production companies in Los Angeles and New York, and later as a movie producer and feature film production executive in the feature film division of Columbia Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal Pictures, and Warner Brothers” with a slew of big name actors “on film projects with budgets well over $100 million dollars. I have served as a commissioner on the City of San Bernardino Arts Commission and the Historical Preservation Commission.”
Malmuth says “I am distinguished from my opponents for the position of San Bernardino mayor by my more directly suitable skills in municipal government analysis and management, and long term entrepreneurial experience in high budget communications media and entertainment projects. None of my opponents possess the structural understanding or desire to undertake the necessary fine tuning of the current mechanism of city government to bring about an inherently more efficient, economically productive, and democratically participatory municipal government. I am a pro-business-development-and less-government-restrictions Democrat and I am in agreement with the latest publication of the platform positions of the Democratic Party, which I believe are more suitable to improving the future conditions of the City of San Bernardino than the Republican and Independent platforms of my opponents.”
Continuing, Malmuth said, “I believe that the major issues facing the City of San Bernardino regarding dysfunctional management, leadership, wasteful spending, and ineffective revenue enhancement stem from a lack of effective resident input and participation. The current $600-per year part-time San Bernardino City Council members are inefficient and have brought about the creation of city council member private consultancy businesses that are ethically questionable. For example, one issue involves councilman John Valdivia’s publicly available Form 700 indicating a $300 gift from Cole Burr, the CEO of Burrtec Waste Management, and Mr. Valdivia and Mr. Burr having had ongoing dealings with one another through Mr. Valdivia’s outside consultancy, yet Mr. Valdivia did not seem to possess the ethical responsibility to recuse himself from the recent San Bernardino City Council vote to increase the Burrtec waste collection city rates, which would have been the proper thing to do even though the legal limit on gifts is $470. The city is just getting back on its feet financially and faces a delicate period, and Mr. Valdivia’s past unusual voting record of consistent “no” votes on matters coming before the city council is troubling and portends stagnancy if he were to obtain the office of mayor. Mr. Valdivia’s past close connections that included substantial financial campaign contributions from the San Bernardino police and fire departments, and their overdone charter-required salaries, affects his judgment to the detriment of the city, in my opinion.
“Another major issue example,” Malmuth added, “involves the lack of political understanding and leadership of Mayor Davis, who has consistently failed to create innovative ideas and apply his background as an accountant accurately, as demonstrated by his failure to accurately add up the figures of the recently considered city budget and causing a wasteful duplication of the administrative passage process,” Malmuth added. “I also believe that the issue of failing to completely observe the fundamental rule of the separation of church and state by Mayor Davis, and some others in the city government leadership, has harmed the city. Mayor Davis has included the words “church leader” in his campaign literature and I believe that he has not kept his personal views apart from the marijuana implementation initiative, which was endorsed by the electorate and has been improperly stalled by some of the city leaders.”
To come to terms with the challenges the city faces, Malmuth said, city leaders need to “compartmentalize each area for rectification and improvement through the creation of a number of San Bernardino resident-staffed deputy city mayor positions, as has been done in the city of Los Angeles. In addition, the various San Bernardino city commissions need to be reformulated from a currently mandated advisory role, supervised by attending respective city department heads, to an independent, qualified resident commissioner’s recommended vote role request to be approved by the mayor.”
Malmuth suggested the city can redress the problem of homelessness through the creation of “cargo container home conversion villages.” He called for physically transporting to other cities “ex-convicts dumped in San Bernardino by prisons.” He said the city needs to concentrate on street repairs and improvements, senior resident care, putting newspaper sale boxes throughout the city to promote communication, promoting business and job creation and generating revenue through selling advertising on bus shelters, and the “implementation of concession-run electric bicycles and scooters charging stations to be used by street beat-type police officers and residents.” He called for utilizing the city’s currently accumulated $40 million surplus to fund programs, and ceasing the “write-off of significant uncollected debts.” He recommended “reconnecting the old military railroad spur that used to attach the now-named San Bernardino International Airport to the national railroad system to bring lucrative passenger and cargo traffic to the proprietary airport and increase large amounts of spill-off revenue to the City of San Bernardino.”
Furthermore, Malmuth said, “The beautiful historic buildings and colorful neighborhoods of San Bernardino are not being effectively presented to the heads of the nearby six major movie studios in Hollywood to attract more big budget feature filming and positive publicity for San Bernardino by someone with the skills of an experienced movie producer.”
Outlining shortcomings he sees in city operations, Malmuth said, “The proprietary status of the San Bernardino Municipal Water Department needs to be examined, since the city of San Bernardino basically sits atop an underground lake and the water department has been filling its coffers to excess with sales of huge quantities of excess water to other nearby municipalities and entities, while at the same time raising water rates for residents and not voluntarily sharing the large amounts of revenue with the City of San Bernardino, as the proprietary City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been doing with the City of Los Angeles for many decades. Also, the head of the San Bernardino Community Development Department is not encouraging the building of airport-connected businesses on the city side of the airport fence to increase city revenue, since proprietary revenue inside the fence is not able to be shared with the City of San Bernardino under Federal Aviation Authority regulations. The head of community development is instead concentrating on a misguided high rise downtown development on 46 acres of land that sits atop the semi-liquified soil of an underground lake and directly over the San Andreas fault line.”
Malmuth has lived in San Bernardino since 2010, having first moved to San Bernardino County in 2005.
Malmuth is a graduate of Wingate High School in Brooklyn, New York. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in political science, psychology and English literature from the City University of New York before attending law classes at Syracuse University Law School, New York, St. John’s University Law School, New York and California State University, Los Angeles. He is a screenwriter and producer.
Unmarried and without children, Malmuth said this leaves him “with the consequent available time to be a full time, dedicated mayor of the City of San Bernardino.”-Mark Gutglueck